Spotlight: Addis Video Art Festival

New York (TADIAS) — This month the second Addis Video Art Festival takes place at various locations in Ethiopia’s fast-changing capital exploring the notion of “love triangle” and featuring works by a diverse group of international artists interpreting unique personal vantage points formed as a result of constant mobility, forced or otherwise.

The festival, which will be held from December 24th, 2017 to January 03, 2018 “presents works that translate new positions that are created from the experience of moving or changing between place, time and or identity,” the press release states, adding that love triangle “implies a connection and ties between three entities; the subject and two objects. Due to a surge in development, many residents of the city of Addis Ababa will be relocating to new neighborhoods. For those who move their sense of belonging is no longer singular, instead they are tied between yesterday and today, here and there.”

The video presentations are scheduled to be screened at Alle School of Arts and Design at both the opening and closing reception, as well as at Addis Fine Arts, Addis Ababa Museum, the National Gallery, British Council, Fendika Cultural Center. A public screening is also scheduled at various locations including Merkato, Sidist Kilo, Arat Kilo, Biherawi and supermarkets in Bole.

In explaining their selections for this year’s festival organizers note that:

The theme of love triangle appears in many manifestations from the intimately personal to the socio-political-environmental to the cosmic. While the mechanics of triangulation has uses in politics, psychology, social sciences, and in the interpersonal politics of love, the essential method is always the same: by converging measurements taken from two distinct points, a more confident result is found, validating the data, be it time, space, or people, from the perspective of multiple observers. In this way, the complexity of the human experience is portrayed more accurately. However, triangulation also points out absences as space is filled from all sides in a balancing act that correlates to the other sides, one can easily find what is not contributing to the whole.

The press release adds:

One video work surveys the aesthetics of demolished sites around Ethiopia and questions the ideology they represent, an ideology that does not value the culture, identity, and social morals of the region. Another video work takes us to India where the landscape becomes a political conversation in which different perspectives of history and mythology are explored, from a riverbed of trash to a 28th story rooftop. The video works show us that this triangulation can also be a disgusting and seemingly infinite loop of economics and human labor in which vulnerable people are currency.

Some of the highlighted Ethiopian artists include Mulugeta Gebrekidan, Martha Haile, Helina Metaferia and Yacob Bizuneh.